Five Essentials of Talent Management

Five Essentials of Talent Management

Getting the right people in the right job is a lot more important than developing a strategy’, according to Jack Welch. If hiring talented people is the number one concern for most organisations there is more to talent management than recruitment, it goes right to the heart of the organisation. Strategy needs to be people-centric for employees to embody the corporate values and goals. Still, we continue to witness some outdated processes which compartmentalise talent management into silos such as HR, talent acquisition, L&D, direct line managers and ultimately the C-suite. For a greater synergy, an end-to-end talent management strategy must link all these silos in order to give the appropriate priority to talent management in all departments. Once this basis has been established, you’ll be able to put in place a comprehensive talent management solution with five essential components that will help you identify, develop and retain the best talent for your organisation.

1. Culture of learning
A job should not solely be filled based on past experience and performance, but on the employee’s potential and aptitude to adapt to a new role. That’s why ensuring continuous informal and formal learning and development is key to help develop new skills and prepare for a new role. Personalised learning will also create better engagement and will likely help retain talent. Having a talent management system, like Aura Talent, that can integrate with a learning management system such as Totara Learn is a good step in to enable this and ensure learning initiatives will help your people grow in the organisation and bring the organisation’s strategy to life.

2. Competency frameworks
A competency framework is essentially the lingua franca of capability in the organisation. Competency frameworks help drive consistency within the business when recruiting employees, managing their performance and developing them. It can perform a pivotal role in ensuring everyone understands what is expected of them in a specific role and for a given context. An effective talent management strategy should begin with competency framework development that will serve as the foundation for future talent management initiatives.

3. Performance management
The managing of talent in the organisation reaches into performance management. To implement a talent management strategy it is important to understand performance. Analytics and comprehensive talent management system solutions that have a performance capability will help with this as it brings the data into one place and provides managers with clear indicators on talent strategy implementation and performance issues. Having a talent management system that integrates with your Totara Learn platform offers further efficiencies as all training records, learners progress reports, manager ratings and appraisals will naturally feed into the talent management platform.

4. Career development and career pathing
While performance management is all about developing the skills and competencies of your workforce to meet the organisation’s needs, career development is about supporting your employees to develop and realise their potential. Understanding their strengths, skill gaps and interests is the first step in the career development process. While learning and training will be fundamental parts of your employees’ career development, structured coaching will give them the necessary feedback they need to grow professionally. By facilitating conversations with their manager on a regular basis, the employee will gain insight into their performance and skills to work on.

It is important for employees to understand what opportunities exist within the organisation and how they can work towards them. A robust talent management system will facilitate this and give a clear development path for employees to follow based on their aspirations. This is also a clear signal to employees that the organisation is willing to invest in them which is proven to improve employee retention and motivation.

5. Succession planning
Succession planning is all about knowing the needs of your organisation and developing the capacity to address these needs when – and even before – they arise. But how do you anticipate your future talent needs? The key to effective succession planning is to be aligned with your overall talent management strategy, which then includes your training initiatives, performance management, career development and recruitment. Collecting all these statistics will help you figure out who is competent for a role ready to be filled or who needs to improve their skills. Combining the data from all these initiatives in one place will help build one central talent pool, where you can easily spot the high potentials ready to step into a key role.

As a Totara Partner, Enovation has been researching talent management for a number of years now, understanding what employees and managers need in order to develop and execute an effective talent management strategy. Aura Talent has been built based on this research. Aura Talent empowers employees to realise their potential in the organisation and allows managers to be effective coaches. If you are interested in discussing this further please feel free to contact me.